The End of Storytelling

We live in a world of stories. We watch movies. We read books. We watch YouTube videos about how theme park rides are made. (All of us do that. It’s a universal shared experience.) At weddings, the best man and bridesmaid tell embarrassing stories about the bride and groom. At the doctor’s office, patients tell nauseating stories about how they got sick. We make sense of the world through the prism of stories. The story of your worst day. The story of your marriage. Our memories are scenes in the grand story of our lives. We even refer to parts of our lives as “acts.” If you are a rich person in Hollywood, you can look forward to a “second act” starting a tchotchke store in Ojai. Everything is stories.

For the first time in my life, I can imagine a world without stories. More precisely, a future where storytelling is a diminished art. Where we communicate by hacking attention, rather than weaving narrative. It’s a dark timeline. A real Age of Apocalypse scenario. There’s a lot of money and talent trying to will this future into existence, whether the tech world fully realizes it or not. I think they do, and I hate them for it.

One of my favorite cultural commentators is Ryan Broderick of the newsletter Garbage Day. He has incisive and well-observed takes about internet trends. This video of his stuck with me. I recommend you watch it. In the video, Ryan argues how, increasingly, everything on the internet feels like porn. Not in the sexual sense. (Well, maybe those creepy AI videos about the Love Island fruit people…) Ryan is referring to short form videos where the primary goal is to capture the viewer’s attention by quickly inducing an emotional response. Porn does this, but so does a video that opens on a dirty foot (disgusting!) or a man spitting on a homeless person (shameful!) or a woman whispering into a microphone (tingly!) then messily eating a pile of chalupas face first (back to disgusting!).

I worry today’s culture creators are disincentivized from telling narrative stories. If you’re a professional creative not employed by the shrinking entertainment industry, where the Hollywood job market is dying and my fellow game developers are getting fired by the thousands, then you’re likely competing for attention on social media. Here are three things I’ve come to understand about the way social media works today.

1. Users on platforms like TikTok watch a video for less than a second before scrolling to the next one.
2. Creators need to make highly trafficked videos regularly and frequently to be promoted by an algorithm.
3. A single viral video doesn’t pay content creators well. Frequent production is needed to make a living.

To make a living in this system, a professional creator would be smart to make cheap, low effort, high engagement videos. In other words, content that scales. Slop! Glorious, mind-numbing brain rot. The kind of video you can shoot in a bedroom that will instantly make the viewer upset or confused, so they stop scrolling and watch. Or the kind of video you can prompt a generative video AI to barf out.

Granted, society critiqued television for being brain rot entertainment, too. Long before prestige television, there was the old chestnut, “There’s a thousand channels and nothing to watch.” When I grew up in the 80s, TV was a “boob tube” and I should’ve been reading books. That’s true! I should’ve read more books. My sweet, precious Muppets were right! (Ironically, though, they were creatures of television.)

But think of the most ridiculed TV genres of the past. Pro wrestling tells the story of heroes overcoming adversity and impossible odds. Family sitcoms tell the story of how kids and parents learn important life lessons. Hell, even infomercials tell the story of how a thermal dish soap dispenser will save me, a frustrated housewife, time and money. Television is overflowing with stories. Sometimes they’re richly emotional and thought provoking stories. Sometimes they’re the story of a couple who won’t buy a house unless it has marble kitchen countertops. But they’re stories nonetheless. Short form videos on social media are often… something else.

I’m not saying there’s no story-driven content on social media platforms. There are comedians who do 1-person sketches to camera, femmes who do their make-up while spilling the tea, and an endless stream of video essayists telling stories about why Marvel is bad now because women exist. People have been telling stories for thousands of years. Social media gives us new stories we’d never get through TV, movies, books, or games. Hooray for Mark Zuckerberg? (No, never.)

When I see a pop culture trend that eschews narrative, and a system incentivized to do so, I get concerned. I don’t think we’re going to see the end of all storytelling, per se. What I’m worried about is the end of storytelling as the dominant mode of expression in entertainment media. Traditional storytelling encourages us to go on a journey with a protagonist, where we see our world from a different perspective. We come away from (good!) stories with a new understanding of life. I can imagine a world where story-driven media becomes niche. A shadow of its former self that old people complain about there not being enough of anymore. In this future, entertainment becomes more cynical and desperate (if such a thing is possible)! Our attentions hacked for no purpose other than profit, most of which goes to a handful of tech mega-corporations. Manipulation for money. Media as drug. This is reading like a paragraph from a cyberpunk TTRPG player’s guide. Maybe that’s the future we’re headed towards?

Will games have stories in this world? Will I be unemployed and sent to the human farm for AI mind harvesting? In general, gamers prefer longer games. There’s an expectation that if you’re charging $50, there’s at least 20 hours of gameplay. Or something like that. The industry has done studies showing a great narrative highly increases retention and completion rates. Putting two and two together, if you’re a studio making a game and you don’t want people to quit after 30 minutes to get a refund on Steam, a talented game writer is a strong addition to the team. But that’s assuming enough people continue to have the attention span for traditional games. Mobile is already the dominant platform for games. It’s not hard for me to imagine an attention-hacking TikTok for games taking off, where players scroll through a feed of Warioware-but-slop, like those creepy mobile game ads, but real. So, yeah, I just wrote myself out of feeling safe.

Of course, there’s a fallacy in thinking that the future must be an exaggeration of the present. There are reasons to be hopeful. Gen Z is getting into physical media. More people are going to the movies. Everyone hates AI slop. And every generation thinks the emergence of new media is a civilization ending event. There have been moral panics over video games, music videos, and even books. I don’t think attention-hacking short form videos will be the end of civilization. We will survive and evolve. What I worry about is what we’ll evolve into.

🎲 Your Turn: Do you share the same fears as me? Or am I blowing this out of proportion? Do you read Garbage Day? It’s a really good newsletter and I highly recommend it. Quick, what’s your favorite story-driven form of entertainment? I’d love to hear from you! Reply directly to this email or leave a comment by hitting the orange button below.